If you want to get into shape, you might decide to eat more vegetables and go to the work out more. But what if you want to have more energy, improve your mood, and sleep better? Welcome to “biohacking,” where practitioners use data about themselves and their environment to perfect their daily routine of eating, sleeping, working, and exercising for optimal performance.
Biohacking has been around for a while—but is now making its way into the workplace. Well, the Silicon Valley workplace, at least.
At Nootrobox, a San Francisco company that makes brain supplements, the entire company collectively fasts for 36 hours every week. “It was hard for the first couple of weeks, but now it’s like the company culture,” says co-founder Geoffrey Woo. “A weekly ritual if you will.” Some members of the nine-person company, all aged from mid-twenties to mid-thirties, even start early and do a 60-hour weekly fast.
Woo defines biohacking as treating your body like a computer system. “That means being experimental and rigorous about inputs in the system,” he says. “Measuring, quantifying and optimizing those inputs for specific outputs.”
Woo and his co-founder, Michael Brandt, have used data to solve larger problems since they met as computer science majors at Stanford. While in college, this took the form of Brandt using a journal to track all his conversations, in a bid to get better at talking to women. “It shows that mindset of being very rigorous, of measuring and quantifying one’s schedule to optimize for an outcome,” says Woo.
This same methodical approach is behind the company’s weekly staff fasts. And the method is working, says Woo—Tuesday fast days are “one of our most productive days of the week.”
Dave Asprey, 42, one of the first biohackers and an advocate for the practice, has spent $300,000 and two decades on hacking his own body and says he plans to live to 180 years old.
He says there’s considerable interest among various Silicon Valley companies in the work produced by his biohacking company, Bulletproof. Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, for example, invited him to speak to her company’s whole workforce, he says, and Yahoo owns a “Bulletproof Vibe,” a machine that vibrates the whole body and is intended to replicate some of the benefits of exercise.
Among Asprey’s own employees, executives use a heart rate variability sensor before big meetings to try to take themselves out of fight-or-flight mode. The result, Asprey says, is “we’ll have meetings that are more cooperative and creative.” He has also asked neuroscientists to hook his senior leadership team up with electrodes so they can monitor brainwaves and try to control their minds better.
“When you’re in control of your biology, you’re in control of your mind and you can make better decisions,” he says. “You’re actually a better person.”
Asprey’s employees regularly fast and, though he wouldn’t force the company to collectively fast—“that’d be incredibly odd and dysfunctional,”—he says he’d like to introduce an optional staff fasting day.
The downsides to tracking your body at work
Though there’s a great deal of excitement over biohacking, the idea of weekly staff fasts likely sounds a little daunting to all but the uber-committed. What if a friend invites you to a dinner party on fast Tuesday? If it’s your birthday and you’d like to bring in cake? Or if you have your period and just really want a piece of chocolate?
Until recently, Nootrobox didn’t have to worry about that last problem. The two co-founders and first six employees were all men, and the Nootrobox only hired its first woman this month.
Inevitably, there are ethical and human resources concerns that come with staff fasting, and some of them are gender-related. Even if a fast is optional, employees may feel pressured to take part. If they can’t, perhaps because of an illness or pregnancy, the employee could be forced to reveal private medical information to the employer.
Asprey also says that fasting is “definitely” not a good idea for people with eating disorders—which tend to affect women more than men. And of course, he says, “there are certain times of the month for women when fasting is much harder.”
There are also questions about whether it’s even right for bosses to see exactly what makes employees stressed or unhappy, and how employers could use health data about their staff.
Brandon Smith, a therapist who focuses on workplace culture, says measuring employees’ heart rates and brain waves raises serious questions. “Will it be used in assessing people’s performance and determining rewards and promotions?” he asks. “For example, ‘Brad clearly handles pressure better than Sanchit. Look at his brain waves.’ Unless this practice is purely voluntary and the data can only be accessed by the participating employee, it is a dangerous idea to implement.”
Smith says biohacking can be a valuable tool for self-discovery, and a means for employees to gain greater self-awareness and control over their emotions. But it should not go further than that.
“When biohacking becomes a tool used by the organization to control and manipulate employees’ emotions, moods and physical reactions to various situations, the company has crossed an ethical line,” he says. “Our journey as human beings is one of self-discovery. To that end, biohacking can be a value. Beyond that, it is a damaging Orwellian control tactic.”
Asprey acknowledges that there can be downsides to biohacking, but that “there’s a much bigger downside to ignoring your environment and letting it tell your biology to get weak and die after you’re too old to have kids.”
For his part, Woo admits that biohacking and staff fasts are a rather specific taste. “Everyone can benefit from the work we’re doing at Nootrobox, but not everyone should work at Nootrobox,” he says. Given the nature of the company’s work, it attracts employees who are already involved or interested in biohacking, he says.
“It’s not a job requirement to fast or biohack but it’s an activity that predicates why we exist as an organization,” he says. “We think biohacking can help people become better versions of themselves, and in turn create a better, more productive society.”
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Written by
Kevin Kelly
Co-founder, Wired Magazine
July 05, 2016
After living online for the past three decades, first as a pioneer in a rather wild empty quarter, and then later as a builder who constructed parts of this new continent, my confidence in inevitability is based on the depth of these technological changes. The daily glitter of high-tech novelty rides upon slow currents. The roots of the digital world are anchored in the physical needs and natural tendencies of bits, information, and networks. No matter what geography, no matter what companies, no matter what politics, these fundamental ingredients of bits and networks will hatch similar results again and again. Their inevitability stems from their basic physics. I endeavor to expose these roots of digital technology because from them will issue the enduring trends in the next three decades.
Our first impulse when we confront extreme technology surging forward in this digital sphere may be to push back. Not all of this shift will be welcomed. Established industries will topple because their old business models no longer work. Entire occupations will disappear, together with some people’s livelihoods. New occupations will be born and they will prosper unequally, causing envy. The continuation and extension of the trends I outline will challenge current legal assumptions and tread on the edge of outlaw—a hurdle for law abiding citizens. By its nature, digital network technology rattles international borders because it is borderless. There will be heartbreak, conflict and confusion.
Our first impulse when we confront extreme technology surging forward in this digital sphere may be to push back. To stop it, prohibit it, deny it, or at least make it hard to use. (As one example, when the internet made it easy to copy music and movies, Hollywood and the music industry did everything they could to stop the copying. To no avail. They only succeeded in making enemies of their customers.) Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long counter productive.
We now appreciate that everything is undergoing change, even though much of this alteration is imperceptible. A vigilant eyes-wide-open embrace works much better. My intent is to uncover the roots of digital change so that we can embrace them. Once seen, we can work with their nature, rather than struggle against it. Massive copying is here to stay. Massive tracking and total surveillance is here to stay. Ownership is shifting. Virtual reality is becoming real. We can’t stop artificial intelligences and robots from improving, creating new businesses and taking our current jobs. It may be against our initial impulse, but we should embrace the perpetual remixing of these technologies. Only by working with these technologies, rather than trying to thwart them, can we gain the best of what they have to offer. I don’t mean to keep our hands off. We need to regulate these emerging inventions to prevent actual (vs. hypothetical) harms, both by legal and technological means. We need to civilize and tame them in their particulars. But we can only do that with deep engagement, first-hand experience, and a vigilant acceptance. These technologies are not going away.
Change is inevitable. We now appreciate that everything is mutable and undergoing change, even though much of this alteration is imperceptible. The highest mountains are slowly wearing away under our feet, while every animal and plant species on the planet is morphing into something different in ultra slow motion. Even the eternal shining sun is fading on an astronomical schedule, though we will be long gone when it does. Human culture, and biology, too, are part of this imperceptible slide towards something new.
(Kevin Kelly/Viking)
At the center of every significant change in our lives today is a technology of some sort. Technology is humanity’s accelerant. Because of technology everything we make is always in the process of becoming. Every kind of thing is becoming something else, while it churns from “might” to “is.” All is flux. Nothing is finished. Nothing is done. This never-ending change is the pivotal axis of the modern world.
Constant flux means more than simply “things will be different.” It means processes—the engines of flux—are now more important than products. Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself. Once we invented the scientific method, we could immediately create thousands of other amazing things we could have never discovered any other way. This methodical process of constant change and improvement was a million times better than inventing any particular product because the process generated a million new products over the centuries since we invented it. Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products. Constant flux means processes—the engines of flux—are now more important than products.
This shift towards processes also means ceaseless change is the fate for everything we make. We are moving away from the world of fixed nouns and towards a world of fluid verbs. In the next thirty years we will continue to take solid things—an automobile, a shoe—and turn them into intangible verbs. Products will become services and processes. Embedded with high doses of technology, an automobile becomes a transportation service, a continually updated sequence of materials, rapidly adapting to customer usage, feedback, competition, innovation, and wear. Whether it is a driverless car, or one you drive, this transportation service is packed with flexibility, customization, upgrades, connections, and new benefits. A shoe, too, is no longer a finished product, but an endless process of reimagining our extended feet, perhaps with disposable covers, sandals that morph as you walk, treads that shift, or floors that act as shoes. “Shoe-ing” becomes a service and not a noun. In the intangible digital realm, nothing is static or fixed. Everything is becoming.
Upon this relentless change all the disruptions of modernity ride.
Source: The future of tech really is an Uber for everything — Quartz